Apple Photos: where are my photos?

Albums, Photos, Last Import, Moments, Projects … help!

Apple Photos, you’re taking over my world and smothering me. I need some space.

Granted, I’m relatively new to the Apple world of photo organization, but I’m getting the feeling it’s one of those things where they’re trying to be helpful and … they’re being too helpful.

I just want to see my photos.

Maybe I just need to go to an Apple store and take a Photos class. But the app is overkill. I love the syncing with the phone and the iPad. Shared photos are fantastic and my family has a wonderful collection of shared albums where we all comment back and forth and it’s great fun–it also keep the far-away family closer by. But when you get serious about photo organization, especially with a family of photographers, you need to get serious about organization.

For years, I’ve used a simple folder structure to organize photos: 2015 and then 12 sub-folders titled 2015-01, 2015-02, etc. Has worked great for a decade. But with Apple Photos, there’s not really a folder structure. There are Albums and Projects and Faces and Favorites, but not a simple folder structure. Technically, as far as I know, Photos also just has your photos in a giant library file that we can’t access.

Please let me export!

I also can’t export out of Photos without losing the original date. This really doesn’t help when I sort my photos into date-based folders. That afore-mentioned file structure is not happily copied to Dropbox when I lose the dates. Yes, I’ve tried the “export original” option. For now, I’m skipping Photos altogether and using Image Capture to export the files directly from my plugged-in phone or from the memory stick.

So what is where and when and … why?

I’m also not when when I’m deleting something if it’s really gone or just gone out of some Album or is it still, somewhere, in Photos or maybe a shared Stream? No, really, I want to delete this photo, how can I really get rid of it?

I often use writing to figure out what to do. The keyboard is my therapist … and technical help desk. At this point, if I can’t continue with Photos and also exporting to my date-based folder structure, then I think I’ll skip using Photos except for photo sharing with family and just get them into Dropbox and hope Dropbox becomes more of a photo organization tool.

While I’m on the topic, since the departure of iPhoto, I can’t even export a file and rename it. It’s just the file name. Just saying.